Nvidia completed its acquisition of Ageia yesterday, and it has revealed that it will soon introduce PhysX physics processing support into all of its GeForce 8-series graphics cards through a simple software download. PhysX support will allow the cards to accelerate physics effects in games.

I wonder if nVidia will continue selling the add-on cards. Discontinuing the manufacturing of the add-on cards and integrating the Ageia shit into all future graphics chips seems like a good way to force people to upgrade. It would also give another reason to pick GeForce over Radeon.

Physics cards have pretty much been laughed out of the market. Don't expect to see standalone physics cards around for much longer. Once developers realized that the physics processing can just be pushed off to the GPU, or to a separate core on the increasingly popular dual and quad core CPUs, they pretty much made physics cards worthless.